Health and Safety

Results in 2016

LTIFR

EVRAZ’ LTIFR started to grow in Q2 2015 as a result of the Group’s systemic effort to ensure full transparency in reporting. Since then, several LTIs that were not duly reported have led to serious consequences for the managers involved, which sent a clear message to both blue-collar employees and managers at all levels that the practice would no longer be tolerated. The Group believes that it is much more important for the management team to have the full picture of the injury rates to be able to step in with corrective actions rather than to prop up statistics, and will therefore persist in driving any falsifications out of its facilities as inappropriate at any level. There is a clear temporal correlation between disciplinary action taken for falsifying facts or circumstances regarding an occupational injury and subsequent increase in the number of injuries reported. The other factor that has influenced the increase is the gradual reduction of total manhours worked, which is mainly achieved through staff reductions in the administrative personnel that operates in a lower-risk environment and are therefore less prone to LTIs.

Fatalities

Although the number of fatalities is gradually going down, EVRAZ has faced six fatal incidents in 2016. Three of the above fatalities resulted from unsafe operations on moving machinery, one employee was fatally injured by a falling object, and another was killed by electric shock after unsafe actions on an electrical substation. The final one involved a rock collapse in a coal mine, the employee died in the hospital several days after the incident due to multiple fatal injuries.

Key projects

EVRAZ believes that the safety initiatives implemented across the Group are helping it support the development of its safety culture and will therefore have a lasting effect on its safety performance. The two key initiatives in 2016 were targeted at reducing the number of unsafe actions through safety conversations on the shop floor and unifying processes with the help of standard safe work procedures.

Safety conversations

Regular safety conversations taking place among employees and managers on shop floors are indispensable for building a positive safety culture. Recognising that such conversations are an essential part of promoting safe behaviour, EVRAZ introduced a system of scheduling such conversations regularly across its sites. Every manager, from a first line supervisor to the CEO, has a personal target to conduct a certain number of such conversations. This is in essence similar to the concept of behaviour safety audits, but EVRAZ chose to focus the attention of managers on the conversation aspect to make sure that they talk to their reports about safety right at the workplace. In 2016, EVRAZ managers completed over 500,000 safety conversations with the Group’s employees, many of them having at least one suggestion to improve safety at work. All these suggestions are analysed by the relevant supervisors and the key ones are tracked through completion.

Standard safe work procedures

One of the key principles of safe work is making sure that the respective process is initially designed in a safe way and all employees are trained to follow the procedure. To support this approach, EVRAZ decided that each structural unit should design 10 standard safe work procedures and implement them in accordance with the corporate requirements. These requirements imply employees’ participation in developing these procedures, as well as proper training and verification on the part of the management team. EVRAZ has designed and implemented over 2,000 standard safe work procedures in 2016.

Key risk localisation programmes

To make safety initiatives more industry specific and more tailor-made to the needs of respective facilities, EVRAZ suggested that business divisions design key risk localisation programmes. These consist of activities targeted at the areas that are of greatest concern from a safety perspective. Some divisions are investing extra efforts in gas safety, some are breakthroughs in working at height etc. This ongoing initiative was launched in 2016, but most of the activities are planned for 2017 and on.